Let Them Read Books: A Teacher's Call to Action, Part I

This extra-long essay began as a write-beside-your-students exercise last year in my AP Lang class and it rapidly snowballed into a manifesto.

The assignment was to write a braided essay, a creative and funky version of the old dry synthesis essay that includes anecdotal material and plays with the conventions of organization.

My original driving question grew out of AP's decision to go fully digital—there are no more test books, no more highlighters, no more annotations in the margins—which, in retrospect, felt like a turning point in history of teaching reading. More on this later.

I've decided to post the whole essay (in chunks) because it's come to inform a lot of my current reading, thinking, and teaching decision-making. Future book reviews and essays will sprout from these ideas.

Let Them Read Books: A Teacher's Call to Action

The approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking … Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature. 

—Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 56

This is our generation’s hinge moment: the time when we decide to take the true measure of our lives. If we act wisely at this cultural, cognitive crossroads, I believe, not unlike what Charles Darwin hoped for our species’ future, that we will forge ever more elaborated reading-brain circuits capable of “endless forms most beautiful.”

—Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

There is no Frigate like a Book 

To take us Lands away 

Nor any Coursers like a Page 

Of prancing Poetry – 

This Traverse may the poorest take 

Without oppress of Toll – 

How frugal is the Chariot 

That bears the Human Soul –

—Emily Dickinson

I teach Advanced Placement English Language and Composition in a high-performing private school. One morning, I was conferencing with students about their personal essay topics; one of my students, generally hard-working and dialed in, was writing about her experience viewing Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides. Having read Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, the source material for the film, I asked if she had done the same. When she said she hadn’t, I said, “well, you might try it. It’s really good!”

She snorted.

“I don’t read.”

I paused, a bit dumbfounded.  “Well, maybe you could try it, because you—”

She cut me off, looking me dead in the face.

“No. I. Don’t. Read.”

At a loss, I wished her luck and continued conferencing with the next student.

Not “I’m too tired,” “I wish I had time,” or “I used to read in Middle School.”

I don’t read.

As able and quick-witted as they are, my students today seem overwhelmed by “too many pages” of assigned reading, not to mention the complexity of dense texts, and an increasing unawareness of context. As a result, when we read silently in class, I see straight-A students often staring into space, not turning a page for ten minutes.  They can take multiple choice exams readily and well, but when it comes time to, say, name an emotion that they feel when they get an understanding of a poem, they are vexed and baffled. 

When I was a kid, I read voraciously.  My mom kickstarted my habit when she gave me a pile of novels for my 12th birthday, all of which she had treasured since her own teen reading years: The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bell Jar. Perhaps ironically, I would go on to reread most of these in school, and even more unexpectedly, I would teach them in an international school in Singapore some thirty years later. From that small stack I moved up to Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Douglas Adams…then on to big doorstop novels like The Hotel New Hampshire, It, and Aztec. The summer of my Senior year, I took on a personal project to read an unabridged translation of Les Miserables after our AP European History class had a field trip to see the musical. Most of the money I made in my first minimum-wage jobs was spent on paperback books. Unsurprisingly, then, I have been a teacher of writing and reading for more than half of my life. 

And now, I look around at my students, many of whom are brilliant, insightful, open-minded, and sharp—but none of whom reads—and I ask, what happened?

Many would blame COVID and remote learning for the “nationwide collapse in reading scores” that the US Department of Education reported in June 2023 (MacArthur). “But while everyone bemoans the lockdown, there’s been curiously little discussion in this debate about the physical object most children use to read,” John R. MacArthur observes, “which, starting long before the arrival of Covid, has increasingly been an illuminated screen displaying pixelated type instead of a printed or photocopied text.”  MacArthur’s Guardian piece announces the impending publication of findings from Columbia University’s Teacher College that “has come down decisively on the matter: for ‘deeper reading’ there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where ‘shallow reading was observed.’” Again, while technology made it possible for schools and classrooms to survive the pandemic, we cannot afford to continue Zoom-school practices now that the time of social distancing is over. When students are in our presence, science has confirmed that we should make physical texts present too. 

Can Reading Even Matter Anymore?

Around the world, reading for pleasure (never mind reading for insight, inspiration, empathy, or understanding) among adults and adolescents is at an all-time low, and the numbers continue to plummet. The National Endowment for the Arts in the US reports “long-term declines in the share of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun ‘almost every day.’ In 2023, the figure was 14 percent, down from 17 percent in 2020” (Iyengar). Johann Hari, in his essential book Stolen Focus, names the “collapse of sustained reading” as one of his main causes for the crisis of attention among teens and adults. He cites the American Time Use Survey, Gallup, and other data to lament that “for the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure” (80).  In 2017—nearly a decade ago—Hari notes that “the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone [emphasis mine]” (80).  Phone use hasn’t changed much since then. “According to recent data…the average person spends four hours and 37 minutes on their phone every day. That's the equivalent of over one day per week or six days per month” (Duarte).  Meanwhile, “on any given day from 2017 to 2023, the amount of time that Americans aged 15 and older spent reading anything ‘for personal interest’ was roughly 15-16 minutes” (Iyengar). This startling shift doesn’t specify literature, books, magazines, or even newspapers—the statistic is reading anything, which means that, on average, an adult spends the same amount of time reading in a month as they spend on the phone in two days. I’ve heard the argument that reading “anything” is better than reading nothing at all, but, as Jay Caspian Kang writes in The New Yorker, “we continue to spend a lot of time reading words [emphasis mine] whether via social media or push notifications or text messages, but it can seem off to label any of that ‘reading,’ a term that suggests something edifying.” As a teacher, I find the edifying aspect of reading to be its most important, and it seems like that purpose has been the first casualty in the war against the printed page.

Culturally, the voices that seem to speak the loudest are reinforcing my recalcitrant anti-reading student’s view that going through life never reading a book is just fine. Donald Trump, arguably the most famous American of the age, is a noted anti-reader. “Trump has never read a single book in his adult life,” speculates The Art of the Deal ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “not even a book about him or ‘by’ him” (Mann). When Fox interviewer Megyn Kelly “asked him about the last book he read, Trump replied, ‘I read passages. I read areas. I'll read chapters. I don't have the time.’ Trump didn't have time to read the last book he read” (Mann.) Kanye West, surely a more influential figure among young men especially, told an interviewer “I am not a fan of books…I’m a proud non-reader of books” (Williams). Fallen crypto-bro Sam Bankman-Fried, like Trump, took an absurdly self-assured stance on reading: “I’m very skeptical of books…I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post” (Williams). To be sure, all three of these men have proven track records that display a stunning lack of empathy.

Despite the mounting evidence that reading—not just “anything,” but reading books, on paper, slowly, and with focus—is beneficial in myriad ways, including and perhaps especially for the deepening of empathy, we are allowing the practice to die. For the moment, at least, teens are still assigned to read in school, but even that requirement is rapidly disappearing, and what remains cannot withstand the maelstrom of algorithmically-pushed manipulative video, fake news, decontextualized soundbites, AI-generated garbage, rage-farming, doom-scrolling, and dopamine-fuelled TikToking that passes today for reading and thinking.

The time has come for me, as a teacher, to change, but not in the way that the Tech Utopianists and STEMmers would have me do. I’ve got to go old-school. Because what really scares me is not the fact that kids don’t read; it’s my growing suspicion that they can’t. Worse, I fear that in the handheld, noise-canceling, viral world of attention capitalism, reading will no longer matter. To be sure, digital technology has enhanced some aspects of education and literacy, but as a teacher and writer, I need to reject the dominance of screens in teaching reading and writing, and require the use of physical texts, and with more time in school dedicated to reading and understanding them. Critical thinking, empathy, and communication skills—thus, hope—may rebound as a result.

The Decline of Reading Books

When I first became a teacher, I assigned my students to read like I had when I was their age.  I expected them to read The Things They Carried, The Scarlet Letter, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Moby Dick, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Hamlet…oceanic texts. Continents of prose and verse.  I loved spending time zeroing in on one passage, one sentence, one line, and helping students expand their minds with language.  I always felt like when the lights came on around the classroom that there could be a deeper understanding among us.  Literature worked.

Then 2008 came, and everything changed. We moved to Singapore, and my new school implemented two initiatives that, upon reflection, were the opening sorties in the battle against books: we required one-to-one laptops for students, and the English Department adopted the Common Core State Standards.  Both of these were immediate blows to the teaching of literature.  CCSS required that a staggering 70% of the texts we assigned and taught in High School be informational/nonfiction (Krull). The laptop initiative saw administrators encouraging us to replace physical books with e-books or online PDFs.  The Amazon Kindle seemed like a game-changer as well. The thinking was that schools could save significantly on space, labor, and money by moving from book rooms stocked with moldering copies of The Great Gatsby that had to be managed several times a year to vast, low-cost electronic “libraries” that could be accessed by anyone with a screen. Reading a book was decidedly not a “21st Century Skill,” one of the twelve “abilities that today’s students need to succeed in their careers during the Information Age” (Hummel). In the late Aughts, we felt our schools entering a mission-statement twilight zone where administrators committed us to the vexing task of preparing our students for an unknown future. This shift often meant abandoning old practices that often rhymed or used alliteration (e.g., “sage on the stage,” “drill ‘em and kill ‘em,” “daily dose of dittoes,” and so forth) in the name of somewhat squishier ideas like replacing “high-stakes testing” with “high-impact standards-based assessment practices.” One of the casualties of the purge seemed to be reading “whole-class” novels, in and out of class, with reading quizzes and checks along the way.  Close reading and discussion fell by the wayside.

In the world outside the classroom, think-pieces were already prophesying the death of the book, and with it, the death of reading. In his New Yorker piece from 2007, Caleb Crain noted the “alarming…indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability.”  Citing some of the same National Endowment for the Arts and Education Department data as Hari, Crain bemoans “steep… declines…in ‘reading for literary experience’—the kind that involves ‘exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,’ in the words of the [Education] department’s test-makers.” In other words, as the curricular focus shifted away from literature reading, discussion, and analysis tasks in schools, teens and adults around the world rapidly lost their grip on the ability to do so.  

Some education experts blamed teaching methods that had come into vogue after the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001 and US States scrambled to install more rigorous standardized testing of skills in reading and math.  In 2009, Kelly Gallagher published Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It, in which he blamed “teaching to the test,” “breadth over depth” in instructional design, and the insistence on teaching “academic texts” over literature (the “A” in “ELA”) as the main culprits in his observation that his students no longer loved reading for pleasure outside of school. I would agree, to an extent, but I wonder now if Gallagher was overestimating the power of an English class to stem an overwhelming cultural tide. There was a storm far more powerful than any standardized test or lesson plan brewing in the culture to kill reading for pleasure: it was the illusion, and self-delusion, of the possibility of reading for pleasure on a screen.

Coming Soon: The Rise of Digital Reading